Splendid Spedo

As previously mentioned, since I don't often have the opportunity to go to my parents house to work on the Mustang, I decided to bring home the gauge cluster to roll back the odometer to "000000" since I'll pretty much have a brand new car when I'm all done with it. It will have a different motor, transmission, rearend, suspension, etc etc. so there was no justification for keeping the original mileage on the odometer.


As noted above, the original mileage in the car was 69,395.8 when I pulled the cluster out of the car. Of course it's unlikely that that the original mileage didn't exceed 70K since the odometer starts back at zero after 99,999.9 miles. That was just another reason it didn't bother me to roll back the mileage.


Once I pulled out the speedometer gauge, I was able to see the odometer and the clip that held it into place. Using a small nail I was able to pry off the clip allowing the odometer to slide out.



After rolling back each number to zero starting with the 10,000th column (the far left in the picture) I would need to move the "lock" into the correct position before moving on to the next column. In all it took me about 10-15 minutes to roll all the numbers back to zero since I wasn't 100% sure what I was doing even after watching a video on youtube on how to do it. While I had it out I decided to use some rubbing alcohol and a Q-Tip to clean the numbers (especially the tenths column since it is white.) If you compare the above picture with the one above it you'll see quite a difference in the white.


The next step with the gauge cluster is to clean up the back, paint the needles florescent orange and to buy a new bezel and lens to put it all back together.


UPDATE February 5, 2011:

I decided to buy some plastic polish/restorer from Autozone and try it out on the original gauge cluster lens rather than automatically purchasing a new reproduction lens. It actually worked very nicely and although there are still some scratches on the lens, they will be out of sight once installed and the portion that shows looks pretty darn new. I'd rather use original parts when possible if they are in good enough condition.


I also painted the front and back of the gauge cluster housing and the metal spacer that mounts inside of the housing. The back of the housing wasn't painted before, but since there was rust on it, I decided to clean it up and paint it with Rustoleum flat black. The inside was painted with Rustoleum gloss white since the gauge lights need something to reflect off of for brightness.


I also painted the back of the metal insert which was also white, but had patches of black originally. I tried to mask it off so that it was painted in much of the same fashion as the original. I don't know exactly why they did it that way from the factory, but I wanted to keep it somewhat consistent. Below is what it looked like originally:


I'm going to still buy a new cluster bezel since the original is plastic, faded and broken in multiple locations. I'll also buy new blue gauge light covers while I'm at it. The pictures above only show three (3) because one of them was broken when I pulled the housing apart. The rest that are still mounted are warped and discolored anyways and should be replaced. When I have an extra $40 I'll buy the bezel and light lenses.

UPDATE February 6, 2011:

I received the needle paint in the mail yesterday so I took some time to paint all the needles in the gauge cluster.

Tell me those needles don't look fantastic...go on, tell me.

 UPDATE 07-24-2011

The gauges are complete! I received the bezel and instrument light covers last week and put the gauges back together the way they are supposed to be. You can see the blog entry HERE.